


Permanent and Official

by 852_Prospect_Archivist



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Episode Related: The Sentinel: by Blair Sandburg, First Times, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 01:56:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/792711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/852_Prospect_Archivist/pseuds/852_Prospect_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of TS by BS, Blair has a big decision to make.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Permanent and Official

**Author's Note:**

> This story is for the folks who are disgusted with the idea of Blair becoming a cop. Didn't I hear that Danny Bilson had indicated that Blair probably wouldn't? This story is a missing scene from one of those fifth season episodes we will never get to see...

## Permanent and Official

by J M Griffin

Author's disclaimer: Jim and Blair were created by someone else. However, nmho, they belong to those of us who love them best.. 

* * *

Permanent and Official  
By J. M. Griffin 

Somehow I'd managed to live nearly thirty years without making one real decision. Which didn't bode well for the outcome of the one I now had to make. 

With that thought, I sighed to myself and slumped back on the couch. Around me, the loft looked like home again, everything back the way it was before Jim did his bit of spring cleaning during that ugly mess with Alex Barnes. Well, not everything was the same, the couch had to be recovered after its little stint in the building basement. One of the overhead pipes had leaked on it, leaving a rusty stain. Where had I hear the line,"You can't erase the stains on the life you have led." I didn't know, but I felt it: stained, dirty. Unlike the couch, there was no way I could be restored to my original condition. Simon and the others at the police station still saw me as a naive kid, but I wasn't Blair Sandburg, boy wonder, any more. I was a twenty-nine year old man who'd lost his doctorate to a lie. 

Funny thing is the lie was really the truth. Jim Ellison truly is a sentinel. 

It had never been my plan to submit that dissertation. But I was driven to write it; the whole shebang just as I saw it, lived it, breathed it. Thus I had lived in a sort of haze as I worked to finish, barely attending to my classes or the work at the station, nothing clear in my head but the words on the screen before me. All my heart was poured onto the pages, as well as every idea, every scrap of insight into the mountain of research I had gathered in my time at the side of this incredible human being, who, for all his failings, was a work of art inside and out. I had breathed him in for three years and then I was breathing him out in every word I wrote. 

When it was done, I knew it was perfect, my holy grail. Of course, as with the grail, there was no one pure enough to actually see it. But in my eagerness to finish, I left off the samite veil which should have shrouded it from view. I should never have left my dissertation in the same state as my mother, much less the same room. It must have been that, deep inside, I wanted someone to read it. I wanted someone to be witness to what I had seen, heard, thought, and felt. My mom didn't read it, though. I had told her not to, hadn't I? No, instead she sent it to an old boyfriend who happened to be an editor. That man broke all the rules and so my work and Jim's secret self were flown like a flag for all to see. I denied it all in the end. The press conference I called was the death knell of my academic career. 

So when Simon said I could become Jim's permanent and official partner, I had leaped at the chance. Because that is what I had wanted all along, since the day I first saw the man in that hospital exam room. But the partnership I had in my head had nothing to do with being a cop and everything to do with being with Jim. 

As I sat thinking, the sky darkened and it started to rain. The loft grew dim without the sunlight streaming through the window. Still, I just sat on the couch in the gloom, unable to find the impetus to get up and turn on the lights. Tomorrow was the day I was supposed to report to the academy for classes. I had a decision to make and I was scared all the way down to my cold, bare toes. 

* * *

"Chief, you okay? What are you doing sitting here alone in the dark?" 

I jumped at the sound of Jim's voice as he came through the door. He quickly set a brown paper bag down on the counter and made a bee-line over to me on the couch. 

"Are you feeling okay? I wondered what had happened to you when you didn't show up at the station after lunch." 

He didn't say, "I called. If you were here why didn't you pick up the phone?" He's no dope, my sentinel friend. 

"I'm not sick." My voice came out in a harsh croak, so I cleared my throat. Jim left my side and went to the refrigerator, returning to shove a cold beer in my hand. I took it, but pressed it against my face to cool my fevered thoughts. 

Jim sat on the coffee table and, his own beer also unopened, peered into my face. 

"Stop it," he said quietly, just as a crack of thunder boomed. 

"Huh?" Despite the thunder, I'd heard him, but I had no idea what he wanted me to stop. 

Jim reached out and took the beer can from my hand. "Blair, I know what this is all about. You don't have to report to the academy tomorrow." 

"But I want to be your partner." I should have opened the beer and taken a sip, my voice still sounded like a frog's. 

"You _are_ my partner. You've been my partner for over three years. I couldn't have asked for a better one. I told you this when we were at the hospital. Did you think I didn't mean it?" 

"Maybe you just said it because of what I'd done at the press conference." 

Jim nodded. "You saved my butt at that press conference. And threw your own career away. But Blair, that doesn't mean you have to be a cop." 

Tears prickled at the corners of my eyes. I swiped them away. 

"But I want to be your permanent and official partner and for that I have to be a cop." I explained. 

Jim just sat there, maybe eighteen inches in front of me, staring at me as if he'd never seen me before. 

For something to do, I grabbed my beer back, popped the top on it and took a swallow. The cool liquid slid down my thought, but it did nothing to quench my thirst. I wanted... I wanted the sun, moon and stars. Sometimes when you want so much, you get nothing at all. 

"If I'm not a cop, there is no place for me in your world, Jim." My voice was still harsh with my unmade decision stuck in my throat. "I'm not an anthropology student anymore. You are no longer the subject of my research. I have to make a living somehow." 

Jim just sat there and looked at me. Was his mind racing, was he gathering evidence prior to interrogation? I couldn't tell. I took another gulp of beer and went on. 

"I have to pay the rent, buy clothes and shoes and stuff. Even if I don't have to buy text books anymore, I still have to..." 

"You don't have to do anything to be part of my world, Blair. You are my world." It was said in a whisper. I looked up quickly to see Jim's eyes were closed, his hands clenched around his beer can. As I watched, he put down the can and opened his eyes. They were blue as the summer sea. He reached out a hand (it was shaking slightly) and touched my face. But this time Jim didn't draw away as he usually did, instead the touch became a caress. He leaned in slowly, closer and closer, his eyes wide. Then his lips met mine and I opened my mouth in a gasp of surprise and his tongue followed my breath as I sucked it back in. 

Thunder rolled so loudly the windows rattled, but I hardly noticed as I kissed Jim back, my tongue twining with his. He slipped off the coffee table and, pushing me over to lie full out on the couch, straddled my body. My hands combed through his silky hair, then slipped down to his broad, muscular back. He moaned and moved against me. One of his hands was in my hair and he rocked against me in a distinctive rhythm that had me answering in kind. 

But then I stopped. It took all my strength to turn my head away. To gasp out a word or two. "Jim, stop." 

I felt him shudder against me, not in climax, but with the effort it took for him to halt the primal rhythm of his body. He pulled away and looked at me, his eyes now dark with need. 

"Why now?" I asked him. "Why now and not before?" 

Jim ducked his head, but he answered. He did answer. "I was always so afraid of my feelings for you, I could never tell you." 

"What changed?" I whispered hoarsely. 

"Me. I changed." Jim lifted his chin and looked at me. "I found I wasn't scared of loving you any more, just of losing you." 

"You love me?" 

"Think I fell in love with you the moment you grabbed my hips and shoved me down so I wouldn't get smashed by that truck. It passed over us and you leaped up and threw your hands in the air. Your hair was flying around your head and you were talking a mile a minute. I was a goner from that moment on, Chief." 

"Oh, " I said, a small sound, barely there, but Jim took it as the acceptance it was and leaned in to kiss me again. This time when the rhythm started I did nothing to stop it, but moved in counterpoint to it, until we were both soaring with it. 

Jim peeled open my pants, shoving my shirt up in his hurry to get to me. When he took me in his mouth, it was as if a light came on in my brain. He'd done this before, there was no fumbling, no exploration. Jim sucked my cock down with the assuredness of long practice. I should have known, he was the kind of man very at home in his own skin, very sure around men and incredibly diffident around women. Why hadn't I known? 

Maybe I'd always known. The way I'd always known I loved him, without really thinking about it. I couldn't fault him for not telling me his secret, not the way I never let on I had an interest in men, especially the big, buff, jock type. I was afraid I'd scare him away. My sentinel-of-the-fear-based-reactions was good at hiding his true feelings. But I couldn't think like this, couldn't think anymore at all, could only feel as Jim's talented mouth and lips and hands were taking up me to the peak. I came with a wail, keening his name. The neighbors were bound to complain. On the way down from the pinnacle, I reached out to touch him through his pants and he groaned and shuddered, climaxing against me. 

He collapsed down on me with a sob and without a word we shifted until we were more side by side, Jim's back shoved against the couch and me pressed up against him. He drowsed beside me, not quite snoring as he breathed softly into my hair, but I was wide awake, as usual after sex, and my mind was buzzing a mile a minute. 

When I was a kid, all major decisions were pre-empted by Naomi's whim to move on. Even my early entrance into Rainier was due more to Naomi's desire to take a trip to India than my wish to hurry off to college. My interest in anthropology had been guided by my favorite professor and the simple, incredible, happenstance of finding Burton's monograph at a rare book sale early in my first year as a post graduate student had propelled me into the search for a real Sentinel. 

It dawned on me as I lay secure in my sentinel's arms that, for all my earlier angst, there had never really been a decision to make. A path had been set for me and I would have plunged down it, doing whatever it took to stay with Jim even if it meant I became something I had no desire to be. Because my greatest desire was to stay at the side of the only person in the world I had ever truly loved one hundred percent with all my heart. It had never occurred to me that there was another way. Now I really did have a choice. 

Outside the rain was slacking off, dying down to a gentle patter. I sighed softly, relieved that the decision I had to make no longer carried the weight of my entire world on its back. Now the decision was truly my own. Come morning, I could enroll at the police academy or go looking for some other kind of job. All I had to do was be true to myself and everything would be fine. 

I sighed again, breathing gently against Jim's expansive chest. He moved against me, a tiny shift as his arm clasped me more tightly against him. 

"My partner always, Blair. No matter what you decide." Jim whispered in my ear. 

"I love you, James Ellison." I said, my voice no longer sounding hoarse, but rich and deep. Jim made a small sound of satisfaction, kissed my temple and went back to sleep. 

**FINIS**


End file.
